


Five Lies About Melody Pond

by Vigs



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-12
Updated: 2015-07-12
Packaged: 2018-04-08 23:55:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4325745
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vigs/pseuds/Vigs
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Choose a truth, if you like.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Lies About Melody Pond

**Author's Note:**

> Content notes: mentions of self-harm and underage sexuality. This is an expanded version of a story I posted to Teaspoon a while ago.

I

Mels first met the Doctor a week after Amy’s eighteenth birthday.

If he’d intended to sneak up on her, he did a very bad job of it. She had been asleep, but by the time the TARDIS had finished materializing, she was on her feet with an excellently sharpened kitchen knife in her hand. It had been dipped in a poison that she somehow knew would keep him from regenerating. Mels somehow knew a lot of things.

The door of the TARDIS opened inward, and after a moment, an oddly-proportioned head popped out, all forehead and chin.

“Hello, Melody,” the Doctor said. His voice was light and slightly breathless, higher than she’d imagined. “Hope I didn’t wake you.”

“You did, actually,” she said. She was wearing nothing but knickers and a cami, and wondered whether he was too alien to notice.

“Ah. Terribly sorry. Thought a Tuesday night would be a good time to avoid running into Amy out of order. Would you mind putting that knife down? I hate having conversations with armed people.”

She tossed the knife on her bed, where she could get at it in less than a second if she had to.

“Are you here to kill me?” she asked.

“What!” He looked honestly shocked by the suggestion, and bounded fully out of the TARDIS wringing his hands. It would’ve been cute if she hadn’t known who and what he was. “No, no, no, of course not! I just wanted to meet you, Melody Pond. I assure you, my intentions are entirely non-murderous.”

“Well, if you’re looking for a good time with a barely-legal teenager who’s obsessed with you, you want the other Mad Girl. Amy’s just down the street. I’m sure she’d have that bowtie in her teeth by now.”

“Not everything is about murder or sex, you know,” he said. He looked distressed and flustered and okay, it actually was adorable, even if he was the Doctor. “And should you be talking about your mother that way?”

“I lent my mother her first tampon and got the play-by-play of her first time. I’m over it.” If he stepped a little bit closer, she could snap his neck before he could react. Well, if his reflexes were close to human, anyway, which wasn’t actually a good bet. “If you’re not here for murder or sex, go away. I’ve school tomorrow.”

“Well. Sounds like you have your priorities well in order.” He made no move to go.

“Do you know that Amy’s whole life has revolved around you?” she asked. “Do you like it? Popping into a child’s life and changing her forever? Do you like that she covered her walls in drawings of you, and thought about you when she was learning to touch herself?”

“No,” he said, and for a moment his face looked as old as she knew he was. “No, I don’t like it.”

“She carved your name into her leg once,” Mels continued, mercilessly. “Did you know that? ‘Doctor’ in big block caps, right across her thigh so her shorts would cover it up. She thought maybe once she’d proved how much she needed you, you’d finally come back for her.”

“I didn’t know,” he said quietly. “How old was she?”

“Fourteen. The scar’s almost gone now. Give it another year if you don’t want to have to see it when you get her naked.”

“R--Melody. It’s not like that. I’m not like that.”

“Really?” She cocked her head. “What are you like, then?”

He gave her a long, inscrutable look, then went back into the TARDIS and closed the door. And then it was gone, like he’d never even been there.

Mels didn’t get any more sleep that night.

  
  


II

Melody would never have saved the Doctor’s life if he hadn’t stopped to change clothes.

That was what made her stop and actually look at him. He was dying, slowly, painfully, and he’d stopped to change clothes. What could his thought process possibly have been? “I can’t walk unsupported, so I’ll need a cane, but that won’t look right with my outfit so I’d better put on tails”?

She knew the Doctor had power, but until that moment she hadn’t realized that he had style. It wasn’t necessarily good style, but it was style, and he made it work.

And that was why, when he started nattering on about some woman named River, she got jealous. He’d stolen the room from her, stolen everyone’s attention and stolen her thunder, and that would be alright if he was some majestic, unknowable god, but he was just a man. How could he be both? That was supposed to be her place, halfway between human and Time Lord, something new and better, and he had taken that from her.

Killing him wasn’t enough, then. She needed to own him. If he could steal her thunder just by walking into a room, just by having existed, she would just have to steal him.

And it helped that he was brave and good, and had been trying to save her parents with what should have been his last breath. But what she was thinking about, when she kissed her life into him, was making him need her.

Maybe then, when she was the center of his life and he revolved around her, she would kill him.

  
  


III

According to Time Lord tradition, River Song married the Doctor while she was still Melody Pond and he was dying in 1940s Germany.

“Tell River,” he said, and then whispered his name in her ear, strange and unearthly and unforgettable. At the time, of course, she had no idea why he’d asked her to tell his name to the woman he clearly loved. How could she not know his name?

“I don’t make a habit of marrying people without their knowledge,” he said when he finally told her what that had been about. “But I thought it was the only way to preserve the timeline. You knew my name when I met you, and there I was, dying without having told you.”

“And that’s enough to make us married?” River asked. She hadn’t been River for long, had only recently been released from the hospital after giving all her regenerations to this man. Her husband. “Goodness, what if you’d told me your birthday too?”

“I know it seems odd, but Time Lord names have power. I actually can’t remember my own consciously most of the time, let alone say it, although I recognize it when I hear it.”

“So how did you tell me, if you can’t say it?”

“Because I was thinking of it as marrying you.”

“Oh.”

“I’m sorry.” He looked perfectly miserable, and she couldn’t resist reaching out to ruffle his hair.

“That’s quite all right, sweetie. I understand about the timelines.”

  
  


IV

“You’ll never love me like you loved Rose,” River said.

“What?” He dropped his fork. They’d been having quite a nice dinner together after an afternoon of what River called archaeology and the Doctor called disposing of dangerous alien artifacts.

“I thought maybe that’s what you were waiting for. To love me like you loved her. But you won’t. It’s all right. I used to mind, but I don’t any more.” She wasn’t even lying.

“River,” he said, emerging from under the table and clutching triumphantly at the fork, “I haven’t even seen Rose in years. And never in this body. And what do you mean, waiting for?”

“To fuck me. I can tell you haven’t yet.”

He dropped his fork again.

“It’s all right, Doctor. She was the love of your lives, the balm to your tortured soul and the light in your darkness and all that other sentimental nonsense. I’m just fun.” She smiled wickedly. “But I’m very, very fun.”

“River...what do you want me to say?”

“Say you’ll stay with me tonight.”

She could tell that night was his first with her. When they’d finished, he lay on his back staring blankly at the ceiling. His arm was around her, but he wasn’t meeting her eyes.

“I love you,” she told him. “It’s okay that you don’t.”

“It’s not. You deserve better.”

“You’re right,” she agreed. “But I make do.”

  
  


V

“Life” in the library computer is River Song’s own personal hell.

Nothing is real. She thinks, at first, that the members of her team are, and that at least one of the children she must care for is, but over time that seems increasingly unlikely.

She had a lot of trouble with the difference between the real and the unreal, growing up. Living near-constantly surrounded by the Silence would do that to a girl. Archaeology had been a way to collect evidence of the universe’s reality.

For a while, she thought she’d managed to find a way to interact with the real world, but that had probably been a simulation as well. Just another way to try to keep her happy, to feed her lies.

Sometimes the Doctor visited. Sometimes a computer program that looked like the Doctor visited. Either way, she would smile and make love to him and thank him for saving her, just in case he actually existed.

And then he would leave, and she would go back to “living” in someone else’s saccharine suburban-parenthood fantasy. She would keep up the morale of her team, design fun activities and challenges for them, direct them to new and interesting parts of the library’s catalogue. And sometimes she would have the computer put her on a simulated world all by herself, completely empty, where she could scream and scream and scream.


End file.
